The Hardy Heron has taken flight: it's the second LTS (Long Term Support) release of the world's most popular distro. New features include the Wubi Windows installer and Firefox 3 beta 5. Grab a copy here, and check out Linux Format's overview of the release.

Sure, why not just fork Debian. Any idea how much work "dropping rpm" is? It's equivalent to killing your distro.

It might be a great distro, but .deb and Debian standards are not things you leave easily.

That's not a "standard". It's distro specific, it's not like Xorg or glibc or kdebase.

Which is why I always wonder why some people can compare such distros with Ubuntu, when these distros aren't even based on Debian.

The essence of comparing is comparing things that are *different*, not the same.

Suse and Fedora are doing a great job and catering for the needs of their user base,

I sense what you really mean is, 'for the handful of losers still using them..'

but if they ever want to attract Debian users there's only one way to do it. Till then, it's like trying to sell meat to vegetarians.

You jest?
You believe for a second that Suse+dpkg=home_run?
Sorry, but it really doesn't work like that.
BTW I wonder what all those Debian users are flocking to CentOS for on servers? Could they actually believe there is an "rpm-based distro" that is doing *something* right?